Shugendo

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Shugendo's own account of its beginning centers on one figure, En no Gyoja, an ascetic tradition places in seventh century Katsuragi, in what is now Nara Prefecture. He was banished by the imperial court to the island of Izu Oshima in 699, accused, an eighth century chronicle says, of sorcery born of envy for his powers. Whatever the truth behind the charge, the mountains he is said to have walked, above all Kinpusen on Mount Yoshino and the peak of Mount Omine, became the tradition's founding ground, and folklore reaching back to around the year 800 had already begun crediting him with feats no ordinary ascetic could perform.

For over a thousand years the practice he is said to have founded grew inside, rather than beside, Japan's established Buddhist schools, organised through Shingon and Tendai temple networks that treated mountain austerity as a path toward the same awakening their own doctrine described. That embeddedness is exactly what the Meiji government moved against in 1872. As part of a broader campaign to separate Buddhism from Shinto and remake Japanese religion along clearer lines, the state banned Shugendo outright, dissolving its organised practice and forcing its temples to declare themselves one thing or the other.

The ban held for over seventy years. It was the restoration of religious freedom after the Second World War that let Shugendo's institutions reorganise in the open: Shingon affiliated lineages regrouped around Sanbo-in, Tendai affiliated lineages around Shogoin, and Kinpusen-ji reasserted its own independent standing as the head temple of Kinpusen Shugendo. Yamabushi walk the same mountains today, in a tradition twice made and once, briefly by government order, unmade.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Shugendo has never had one central authority. Its practitioners, yamabushi or shugenja, train and are ordained inside institutions that belong to two different Buddhist schools, plus one lineage that answers to neither. The Tozan-ha lineage is organised around Sanbo-in, affiliated with Shingon; the Honzan-ha lineage is organised around Shogoin, affiliated with Tendai; and Kinpusen Shugendo, headquartered at Kinpusen-ji on Mount Yoshino, stands as its own independent body. All three send yamabushi to the same mountains and recognise the same founding figure, En no Gyoja, without needing to agree on which Buddhist institution stands over the practice.

What unites them is the practice itself rather than the institution behind it: nyubu shugyo, structured entry into the mountains, treated as training the body toward the awakening Buddhist doctrine describes in the abstract. A yamabushi in the distinctive dress, a pom-pommed harness, straw leggings, a small cap and a conch shell blown to mark ritual moments, walks routes at Kinpusen-ji and Ominesan-ji in the Kii mountains, or at Dewa Sanzan's three peaks, Haguro, Gassan and Yudono, further north in Yamagata. Ominesan-ji keeps a rule unbroken since the early Heian period barring women from its sacred peak, a restriction the tradition maintains even as a separate nearby summit, Inamuragatake, has served since 1959 as a designated training ground for women.

The mountains themselves carry the doctrine as much as any text does. Kinpusen-ji and Ominesan-ji were jointly inscribed by UNESCO in 2004 as part of the Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range, recognition of terrain that two Buddhist schools and one independent body all still treat as the actual site of the practice, not merely its backdrop.